ARCHIPELAGOES

are the playgrounds of mermaids and manatees.
The sea is swift with their passage,
Skits between atolls
and islands strung together, like signposts for birds.

Dawn comes the colour of pomegranates,
and night is a sound whispered in the ear of the nautilus.

Time keeps to other calendars, and other gods
in these islands. Ripe fruit exudes lavish magic,
Like the soft black sand, and the sluggard ripples of the hot sea
Whose waves are thick as honey.

Life began here.
Like parables of plenty,
Sugar-loaf mountains rose in the east.
Olive gods bathed in the lagoons.

Follow a triangle of lazy sail tack the horizon
and fall over the edge of the world, out of paradise

and always recall that
These archipelagoes are strings of fire.
They have volcanoes that steam like dragons, and at sunset smoulder,
Like joss sticks hissing in the sea.

To keep this side of paradise,
You must appease them.

THE SOUTHERN OCEAN

On the horizon grows glistening ice
Long white land
Carved from the teeth of whales

Glacial spring is coming
The wind blusters big waves

If you listen to the ocean's measured voice
In the wide pale eyes of Wakatipu

Sky father and earth mother
are making footsteps on the sea

Breasting the tall greenstone breakers
We, like thin-legged waders

Leave our sand prints
on the midge-bitten coast
to be drawn over by the southern ocean

Salt water has grown spectral as a magic spell
The seaboard sparkles like Spanish treasure

We shall follow the midsummer sea swallows home
With our shadows behind us

PULAU PINANG

Tropical islands are like drowsy bullocks sunning in the sea
but Pinang has no tail of land to swat mosquitoes

only furious jungle
and the old poetry of stupefying quays

Perched on the clumsy colonial waterfront
The mariners' temple grows from knots of joss-smoke

but no one god can contest
The primal reek rising from the
Spilled insides of fish

Now that the ferry is a small dab of rust staining the strait
Upon which the sun speaks in a spiked hokkien tongue

A heron idles out of nowhere
White as a visitation
to pick its archangel wing on the boiling beach
among the cracked skulls of sea coconuts
where allah sleeps in the arms of his sampan

At Sunset
The towers of Georgetown
burn like ingots of fire

and the industrious cooking pots of the old quarter simmer
As they have always done

Before mist soaps the bridge to the mainland
I shall preserve an image

Behind foundered ships
A smooth russet moon is
dipping in
The silver mirror of the sea,
Like Nereid returned to the waves

THE THOUGHT OF ISLANDS

The despairing song of waves
The echoing thought of islands

Brings me where dusty winds whirl like dervishes,
Where Allah commands 'Thou Shalt Nots'
From sun-stricken minarets.

The women in purdah I know,
Dry as Old Testament verses,

The idle, burned street vendors
Who keep faith with only their flied produce,

and the foundered ships off Quay Street,
Like desecrated carcasses in the stinking mud
Bitten by sand flies and tides.

When God has swept the furnace of this sky
and his sun haemorrhages over the sea,
Only then the betel palms shall sway slowly

And the final remains of a dead empire
Pedal its trishaw down Beach Street
Waving generous good-byes.

Tonight an unlikely rainbow has settled over home.

KRISHNA'S PEACOCKS

The spell of ritual
Calls me

To kindle the lamp
Prostrate before unforgiving gods
Fierce as old colonial masters

The sacred camphor
Smells of nostalgia

of time when mother hands
poured with grace
fed the flame

What has been lost is
The old places

They are become a rookery for demons

for stories blemished as
last century's paint

Cross-legged on the evening's blistered steps
Custom is endemic
Fallen as the hot rain

Only memory can summon
The call of Krishna's peacocks
Or the cool of monsoon

CLOUDS

have many tales to tell

To the lime-edged indigo hills
They spread their stories

They say in summer
The Sun burns like a Cyclops eye
and the sky is brash as zinc

Their season is winter
When they swell like the crania of gods

Filling the horizon
Scud like royal galleons in their own empire
Blotting out the sun

Some clouds scowl and grumble
Hurl lightning like the ancients, pent with anger
Throw sleet hard as marble
or cry a river

Others are quiet as philosophers guarding their secret
The sky's lambs

Certain and unfolding
Various as the stars
Clouds stir forgotten senses
Like the smell of frangipani
or the ocean's salt taste

Conceived where seahorses sire great waves
Their young race up from the gulf
Grown tall as Goliaths
Ready for war

When no breezes blow
They are patient
As our parents were
The sky is their hammock

But always when summer comes
They mourn a lost paradise
and are aloof and cool as cirrus
Their noses high in the sky

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